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The 4th Edition of the PMBOK® Guide had a total of 42 processes, spread across 5 process groups and 9 knowledge areas. The 5th Edition of the PMBOK® Guide increases the total number of processes to 47, spread across 5 process groups and 10 knowledge areas. The post from 10/26 described the new knowledge area of Stakeholder Management, and the post from 10/27 discusses the 5 new processes. Today’s post lists the new names of some of the processes and shows how this renaming makes the process names more consistent.

1. New Process Names

Below is a chart that shows the processes whose names have been changed from the 4th Edition to the 5th Edition of the PMBOK® Guide.

If you refer to the above chart, you can see how PMI has made the process names more consistent in the following ways:

Most processes in the Planning process group now have a name “Plan XXX Management”, where XXX is the knowledge area.

Most processes in the Monitoring & Controlling process group now have a name “Plan XXX”, where XXX is the knowledge area.

The other changes are minor semantic changes such as “Verify Scope” is now “Validate Scope” to reflect the fact that deliverables that have been checked and accepted by the customer are called “validated deliverables.” Also, since “Direct and Manage Project Work” is the execution of the project, the process is called that now since the former name “Direct and Manage Project Execution” is therefore a bit redundant.

NOTE: For the five entries that are blank in the 4th Edition column, that means that these processes are new for the 5th Edition and didn’t exist in the 4th Edition. Also, the name of “Identify Stakeholders” is the same, but the knowledge area is different so formally it is known as process “13.1 Identify Stakeholders” in the 5th Edition, changed from “10.1 Identify Stakeholders” in the 4th edition. The “13.1” designates that it is the first process in the knowledge area covered in section 13 of the PMBOK® Guide.

In my opinion, these name changes should make it easier for people to memorize the processes. Once you know the knowledge area and process group for many of these processes, the full name of the process in most cases will be automatic. This reduces the burden on the memory, and hopefully will lead to more memory capacity in the brain to memory what is IN the processes themselves.

The next post covers the controversial subject of agile methodology and how it is covered by PMI in the new 5th Edition.